# gibberish

/ˈɡɪbɝɪʃ/ (US) · /dʒˈɪbəɹɪʃ/ (UK)

Source: https://englishreference.com/word/gibberish
Updated: 2026-08-27

## Senses

### 1. meaningless speech

noun · CEFR B2 · Informal

words that make no sense, like when someone is talking in their sleep or a computer makes a mistake.

For teachers: speech or writing that is incoherent, meaningless, or unintelligible. Uncountable in this sense.

- The fever made him talk gibberish all through the night.
- The corrupted file displayed nothing but gibberish on the screen, making it impossible for the technicians to recover the original text.

### 2. confusing jargon

noun · CEFR C1 · Informal

language that is so technical or complicated that you cannot understand it.

For teachers: needlessly obscure or overly technical language that fails to communicate meaning to the listener.

- The legal contract was full of technical gibberish that I couldn't follow.
- The manual was written in such dense technical gibberish that even the experienced engineers struggled to perform the basic setup.

### 3. unintelligible

adjective · CEFR C2 · Informal

describing something that is impossible to understand or makes no sense.

For teachers: unintelligible, incoherent, or lacking in meaning. Used attributively to describe speech or text.

- He left a gibberish voicemail that sounded like he was in a noisy crowd.
- The witness provided a gibberish account of the events, which the detectives immediately dismissed as a fabrication.

## Examples

- The old computer screen filled with gibberish.
- The software crashed and started displaying a stream of gibberish instead of the actual data.
- The encrypted file appeared as a series of random characters to the untrained eye, effectively rendering it as gibberish until the correct key was applied.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.